Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

What Music Do Pets Prefer?

Animals
like species-specific music that is designed using the pitches, tones and
tempos that are familiar to them.

To animals, human music
falls into a grating, unrecognizable category.

Leaving
on classical music or soothing music for your pets might not be best for them.

Many
pet owners leave their home radios playing all day for the listening pleasure
of their dogs and cats. Station choices vary. "We have a very human
tendency to project onto our pets and assume that they will like what we
like," said Charles Snowdon, an authority on the musical preferences of
animals. "People assume that if they like Mozart, their dog will like
Mozart. If they like rock music, they say their dog prefers rock."

Against the conventional
wisdom that music is auniquely
human phenomenon, ongoing research shows that animals actually do have the
capacity for music. But rather than liking classical or rock, Snowdon, an
animal psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has
discovered that animals march to the beat of a different drum altogether.
They enjoy what he calls "species-specific music": tunes specially
designed using the pitches, tones and tempos that are familiar to their
particular species.

With
no pun intended, music is all about scale: Humans like music that falls within
our acoustic and vocal range, uses tones we understand, and progresses at a
tempo similar to that of our heartbeats. A tunepitched too high or lowsounds grating or ungraspable, and
music too fast or slow is unrecognizable as such.

To
animals, human music falls into that grating, unrecognizable category. With
vocal ranges and heart rates very different from ours, they simply aren't wired
to enjoy songs that are tailored for our ears. Studies show that animals
generally respond to human music with a total lack of interest. With this
general rule in mind, Snowdon has worked with cellist and composer David Teie
to compose music that is tailored to suitthem.

Back
in 2009, the researchers composed two songs for tamarins — monkeys with
vocalizations three octaves higher than our own and heart rates twice as fast.
The songs sound shrill and unpleasant to us, but they seem to be music to the
monkeys' ears. The song modeled on excited monkey tones and a fast tempo made
the tamarins visibly agitated and active. By contrast, they calmed down and
became unusually social in response to a "tamarin ballad," which
incorporatedhappy monkeytones and a slower tempo.

We have some
work-in-progress where we've transposed music and put it in the frequency range
for cat vocalizations, and have used their resting heart rate, which is faster
than ours," he told Life's Little Mysteries. "We find that cats
prefer to listen to the music composed in their frequency range and tempo rather
than human music."

On
the basis of their results, Teie has started selling cat songs online (at $1.99
per song) through a company called "Music for Cats."

Dogs
are tougher nuts to crack, mostly because breeds vary widely in size, vocal
range and heart rate. However, large dogs such as Labradors or mastiffs have
vocal ranges that are quite similar to those of adult male humans. "So, it
is possible that they might be responsive to music in our frequency range. My
prediction is that a big dog might be more responsive to human music than a
smaller dog such as a Chihuahua," Snowdon said.

Indeed,
some dogs do appear to respond emotionally to human music. Research led by
Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, shows that dogs
can discern between human music of different genres. "Our own research has
shown that dogs certainly behave differently in response to different types of
music, e.g., showing behaviors more suggestive of relaxation in response to
classical music and behaviors more suggestive of agitation in response to heavy
metal music," Wells wrote in an email.